As is well known, computer systems, or more generally, any central processor unit (CPU) machine, typically receive input and produce output via traditional devices such as keyboard input, tape, disk, and CD-rom. By way of example, a first user may type a letter into a computer system via a computer keyboard. The keyboard input is typically displayed on a monitor. From there, the letter may be electronically stored on a disk drive, printed on a printer, or electronically mailed (i.e., E-mail) over a communications network like a local area network (LAN) to a second user using some other computer system on the LAN. The second user receives notification of the received letter (i.e., E-mail notification) and uses his computer system and its corresponding E-mail system to display the received letter.
As is also known, methods have been developed to provide voice recognition for computer input in place of keyboard input. With such voice recognition methods, a user speaks into a sound subsystem of the computer and through a matching of the user's vocabulary with a voice recognition dictionary stored in the computer system, the user's spoken words are converted to digital signals and processed and/or stored in the computer system. Further, it is known that computer systems having sound subsystems coupled to a text-to-speech engine may match digitally stored words with spoken words and produce the audible words through the sound subsystems.
It is also well known that present speech compression algorithms like different variants of LPC (Linear Prediction Coding), such as MELP and CELP, may provide compression rates of 2.4 kilobits per second (Kbps) or lower. What is desired is a method and system that approaches compression rates under 100 bits per second and thus provides ultra high speech compression (and language translation) between two parties.